NILES, Mich. — Talk about being in a pickle: A judge gave a 35-year-old man probation in a case that police said involved an assault with pickles.

According to police reports, the pickle problems began when Bobby Lee Bolen of Buchanan was hanging out at his then-friend Jody Lee’s home in Buchanan on Aug. 20.

Bolen went to the refrigerator and helped himself to some pickles. According to the report, Lee told Bolen he couldn’t afford to feed everyone and not to eat his pickles. Bolen then began yelling and swearing and stormed out, according to the report.

Later, Bolen barged back into the house and got into an argument with Lee. Lee told police Bolen slammed him down on the couch and threw two large pickles at him and said, “Here’s your damn pickles.”

October 26, 2007 marks Hillary R Clinton’s 60th birthday. It also will mark the eighteenth day that a “Rough-cut” trailer of an unfinished hour long documentary on Hillary’s political career suddenly appeared as the number one ranked video viewed on Google Video, where it remains #1 as of this posting.

The phenomenon of an unfinished 13 minute political film trailer, never intended to be released to the public, unintentionally leaked on a political blog which spontaneously generated a viral frenzy among internet users, resulting in more than 1.3 million views in the US and England (where it has become the number one political.news video on YouTube) attracted more popular attention than the landmark civil fraud suit Paul v Clinton et al, pending in a California court today

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Members of the Iraqi Army in Besmaya collected a donation for the San Diego, Calif., fire victims Thursday night at the Besmaya Range Complex in a moving ceremony to support Besmaya’s San Diego residents.

Iraqi Army Col. Abbass, the commander of the complex, presented a gift of $1,000 to U.S. Army Col. Darel Maxfield, Besmaya Range Complex officer in charge, Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, to send to the fire victims in California.

The money was collected from Iraqi officers and enlisted soldiers in Besmaya. In a speech given during the presentation, Col. Abbass stated that he and the Iraqi soldiers were connected with the American people in many ways, and they will not forget the help that the American government has given the Iraqi people. Abbass was honored to participate by sending a simple fund of $1,000 to the American people in San Diego, to lower the suffering felt by the tragedy.

Remember that little town outside of St. Louis where the kid videotaped a cop that pulled him over and harrassed the crap out of him? The mayor of the town said he wouldn’t stand for it and pushed to have the officer fired.

Well, the mayor, who is an ex-cop just got into a little trouble himself.

St. George — The mayor of this tiny but recently infamous community resigned Tuesday, a day after he was arrested for misdemeanor drug possession, a city official said.

Mayor Harold Goodman, elected last year, was arrested Monday night by St. Louis County authorities, Alderman Carmen Wilkerson said.

Goodman was a former police officer who had taken early retirement because of illness. Goodman won election in a three-way race in which the incumbent mayor was challenged by his wife while the two were in the process of getting a divorce.

St. George, a one-fifth square mile hamlet at Interstate 55 and Reavis Barracks Road in south St. Louis County, landed in the national spotlight recently after a video of a police sergeant yelling at a motorist went public. The officer was fired.

This is a simple test we use at The New York Times to ensure that our employees reflect a variety of social, political, and economic beliefs. Please read each question thoroughly, and then select your answer with a number 2 pencil. When you complete the exam, please place it in the box marked “Politburo” at the front of the room.

Remember, there are no wrong answers (except on questions 2,5,7,8,13 and 17).

If at any time you feel that you are being pressured in absentia by George Bush and his cronies, please notify a test monitor immediately.

1. Which of the following statements best describes your political leanings:

a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called “gravity grid” of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves — ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light — that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.

It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it’s a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.

“The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons,” explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. “One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn’t control what you do.”

You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner’s label, you’ll earn points depending on how specific your label is. You’ll be shown more images until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you’ve seen and the websites where those images were found. And we’ll show you the points you’ve earned throughout the session.